The end of the year/beginning of the new year is my favourite blogging time and although I’m starting a bit late this time (thanks work), I’m determined to enjoy it to its fullest regardless. To kick off the season, I thought I would reflect on some of my 2025 goals and have a look at some of the many, many statistics I generate each year! I’ll also start thinking about how these goals might change for 2026 – but definitely keep an eye out for my dedicated 2026 goals post coming soon!

Also planned for at some point in this series: 2026 reading journal setup, language learning and general life goals, my favourite books and music of 2025, my most anticipated releases for the first quarter of 2026, and my first quarter personal curriculum. If there are any other posts you’d like to see, let me know!

Without further ado, let’s take a look!

1. Goal 1: Read 52 books and 15k pages
2. Goal 2: Read consistently
3. Goal 3: Reduce my TBR and read the books I purchase
4. Goal 4: Be aware of new releases
5. Goal 5: Revisit beloved authors and series
6. Goal 6: Participate in community reading events
7. Goal 7: Read more books that develop my skills/interests
8. Goal 8: Read more globally and diversely
9. Goal 9: Read more in languages other than English
10. Goal 10: Complete 80% of 80% of goals
11. Miscellaneous, Fun Stats!

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Goal 1: Read 52 books and 15k pages

Sometimes then setting my “read ## books” goal I will include rereads and sometimes not. Or sometimes I only include books that could be tracked on Goodreads (since Storygraph also allows me to add my own “non-book” entries for things like individual short stories). But by whichever metric you like, I completely smashed this goal.

The biggest estimate (everything I tracked on the Storygraph) is 94, but even Goodreads still lands me at 80 books!

And if we exclude the 25(!) books that I reread this year, then I still read 65, which is well above my target for 2025.

Looking forward to 2026 I will probably keep my goal of 52 books, but I will specify this year that it doesn’t include individual short stories or rereads. As you can see above, if I read a similar amount to 2025, this should be absolutely doable. I will be upping my page count coal to 20k, but this still shouldn’t be a big stretch.

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Goal 2: Read consistently

I had three sub goals for this one:

1. Read at least 244 days (2/3 of the year)
   This could be even a single page and would still count! I made it about 86% of the way to this goal and read 210 days of the year. I will be keeping this goal the same in 2026 and hopefully I can hit it this time!
2. Read 30 minutes at least four times per week
   This was very hit and miss – sometimes I reached it easily, and sometimes not at all. In 2026 I’m going to keep a similar goal but slightly lower the requirement in the hopes of being able to more consistently hit it.
3. Read at least 1 short story or essay per week
   This is the one of the three that I did the worst on – I did read quite a lot of short stories but it tended to be in short bursts.

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Goal 3: Reduce my TBR and read the books I purchase

This goal also had multiple parts to it!

The first thing I did was have a points system for earning new book purchases. Although I paused it for the month I was in Korea and I had a lot of exceptions for things like books for research, I generally otherwise stuck to my rule of 3 books read for each book purchased.

I also wanted to read about 80% of the books that I added to my “active TBR” (so excluding books that I’m using for research etc).

If we only count the English books I bought – and I think is fair since most of the other books have been in boxes on a ship somewhere for a good chunk of the year – then I’ve read about 57% (17/30) of my “active TBR” additions this year, and the majority of the unread ones are from the last couple of months. Technically this goal was to read the books within two quarters of purchasing them – so I still have a couple of months for those final books and I’ll count this part of the goal as basically (barely) accomplished.

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Goal 4: Be aware of new releases

My goal for this was to pick one new release from each quarter to buy and read. I mostly did this – I am currently reading my pick for quarter 4 (The Everlasting), so it’s a bit late but not massively late. I’ll count this as 90% achieved! I want to up it a bit for 2026 since this was goal was made when I wasn’t writing a book review blog, and there will be more of a focus on reviewing the releases I read.

In the meantime – check out my reviews for The Incandescent and The Second Death of Locke!

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Goal 5: Revisit beloved authors and series

This goal had two parts. For the first, I picked four authors that I wanted to read another book by – Becky Chambers, George Orwell, Cho Namjoo and Kazuo Ishiguro. The only one I didn’t get to was George Orwell.

I also made a list of series that I’m not up to date in and wanted to read one book in each of them – of the eight series, I read a book from 4 of them, so I guess this is 50% completed?

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Goal 6: Participate in community reading events

This goal mostly involved participating in selected yearly challenges, as well as the Magical Readathon. I did… okay? Sometimes?

• 12 books in 2025: 3.5/12 (😅)
• Storygraph Reads the World: 2/10 – I read China and Malaysia (😅😅)
• Buzzword Challenge: 10/12 – not bad!
• Buzzcover Challenge: 12/12 – yay!
• Magical Readathon – I did really will in the Spring term and then basically didn’t do anything for the Autumn term because it hit the first month of my master’s degree and I was too busy adjusting to a new city, new course, new people etc.

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Goal 7: Read more books that develop my skills/interests

Let’s not talk about this one….

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Goal 8: Read more globally and diversely

I had three main goals for this one:

1. Read one book from each of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. I completed all but South America.
2. Read three books from the Global South. I did this one!
3. Read five books by POC authors who are not East Asian (since I read a lot of East Asian authors I was trying to diversify further). I had wanted not to double up across the challenges, but in the end I didn’t read enough to do that. I ended up reading four books, which is better than nothing, but this is definitely something I need to improve in 2026.

I did actually read from quite a few countries though, despite really failing my Storygraph Reads the World challenge and note quite completing this goal either. I read books from 12 countries, including:

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Goal 9: Read more in languages other than English

I also wanted to read 24 short stories in Korean, of which I actually managed 7.5. Not quite as many as I would have liked, but more than nothing!

I will still be trying to read in other languages in 2025, but I’ve decided to keep this mostly as part of my language learning goals and not specifically track it as part of my reading goals.

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Goal 10: Complete 80% of 80% of goals

I would say I completed about 6 of the previous 9 goals 80% of the way, which isn’t quite 80% but… I’m also pretty happy with the progress I made and think it was generally a very successful year for my reading – especially since I started book blogging again!

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Miscellaneous, Fun Stats!

We’ve discussed all my goals from 2025 now, but don’t go anywhere! Although maths isn’t really my thing, recording information and creating fun statistics definitely is (weird how that works). So not only do I have some fun stats from the Storygraph to give you, I also have some fun graphs of my own (some of which you’ve seen above).

Genres I Read This Year

According to the Storygraph, my most read genre was fantasy, and my own records would agree with that – about 42.4% of the fiction I read this year was fantasy, and that’s similar to the overall percentage as well. However, whilst my own records put romance at about 2.4%, Storygraph lists this as my second-most read genre.

This is probably because I reread a decent amount of what might be considered ‘fantasy romance’ books. I list them under fantasy because I think they’re more fantasy heavy than romance heavy – more strictly ‘romantasy’ books get put under ‘romance’ – but Storygraph will count those books for both ‘fantasy’ and ‘romance’. I have a subgenre graph as well which shows about 5 romantasy and 14 fantasy romance books, but that graph is too ugly to show you (so many tiny slivers!).

Apart from that, I read a lot of classics and short stories – largely for my degree – and literary fiction as well. Not seen in the Storygraph stats but coming in equal to literary fiction in my own stats is also science fiction, which has been especially big for me in the second half of the year.

Ilona Andrews Mania

Another very interesting statistic: I read 23 books by Ilona Andrews this year. That’s almost a quarter of all the books I read! Albeit most of them were rereads of series – but I did read 5 new books by them as well (mostly continuations to series + 1 new series).

Keira’s Ratings in 2025

As for my rating distributions this year, it seems pretty standard for me and I’m also pretty satisfied with the spread. Of course, more 4 and 5 stars reads is always welcome, but this is the kind of distribution I would usually expect as I tend to assume most books will be about 3.5 stars and then work up or down accordingly depending on if they were particularly good or bad. If you’re interested in how I assign star ratings, check out my explanation here.

In the end, I gave 3 books 5 stars (which I’m pretty stingy with, to be fair), and 22 books 4 stars. I won’t tell you which ones yet because that will spoil my upcoming post on my favourite books of the year 😉

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And that’s it for this reflective post! The next coupe posts I’ve got planned are all more 2025 wrap up/looking forward to 2026 posts, so I hope you enjoy them. And if you’ve shared any of your own reading reflections or statistics, please link them in the comments below so I can go and check them out!

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Keira x